Spiffy:

Iffy:

With or without the governator(s), the "Predator" franchise is made for gaming. The first Alien Versus Predator game is already tough to beat, but there's never been a good, much less great console game featuring the insect-headed hunters. Vivendi and developer Eurocom Entertainment are aiming to change that with Predator: Concrete Jungle. We sat down with a recent build of the game to see how the alien's safari is turning out.

One thing the "Predator" movies and games have never really tackled is story, and Concrete Jungle tackles that deficiency head-on. You're a hunter disgraced for revealing yourself to humans back in the 1930s. It's not so much that you were seen, but that mankind grabbed some tech and learned how to create alien weaponry. After one hundred years of exile, players are sent back to Earth to clean up the mess and regain their honor.

That story, of course, ends up being an excuse to put players through all sorts of action and pseudo-platforming gameplay. Quite a few styles are crammed in here but third person action basics make up the foundation. High jumping, shimmying along ledges and extensive exploration are all key. Objectives range from invisibly tailing a target to skinning and hanging copycat killers, all while avoiding dishonorable targets, i.e. plain ol' humans.

The training level gets across most of the basics, but some of the more complex moves, like hanging trophies, are taught during missions. As you face more of the game's enemies, the Predator will face his own weapons, too. So it's not enough to learn how to use your own cloaking device well, since other enemies have their own cloaking abilies, which confound the predator's targeting systems.

Basic combat works fairly well so far. There are light attacks, typically barehanded or using wrist blades, and heavy, which take advantage of the multi-purpose staff. By locking on to targets, various special moves and combos can be unleashed, such as impaling an enemy and throwing them into the air, or jumping on a fallen foe to graphically squash the life out of them.